My bold ….

We think you are going to love Flickr under SmugMug ownership, but you can choose to not have your Flickr account and data transferred to SmugMug until May 25, 2018. If you want to keep your Flickr account and data from being transferred, you must go to your Flickr account to download the photos and videos you want to keep, then delete your account from your Account Settings by May 25, 2018.

This reads that all Flickr moves to SmugMug - and if it doesn’t your Flickr account will be deleted.

To my knowledge there is not a free SmugMug.

So is that going to be introduced after May 25th? Or will we all then be paying?

Again not me .. but …

I’m specifically not deleting my account because:

1. I intend to exercise a number of my data subject rights, and complain if Facebook does not respond appropriately.
   
2. I’m expecting the alternatives to Facebook to improve (because they’re virtually non-existent now), and will look forward to using data portability.

The following is an experiment using Siri to talk to Drafts which I will then publish to microblog. The idea works by use of special code inside of Drafts that allows you to talk to your device and it in turn happily translates that into text. The cool thing is that normally with Siri there is a time cut off. With Drafts you can keep on talking talking talking while it types and types and types. What it doesn’t seem to do is improve the ability of Siri to understand what you’re saying.

One step at a time.

The premise is simple: instead of owning your own bike, you can find and rent a JUMP bike directly in their app – each one has a built-in GPS. Bikes are scattered across the city, locked to racks, poles, or even trees.

An example of went wrong in China is below - and that doesn’t include bikes tied against trees, lamp posts and stop signs that will be all over San Francisco.

Thank-you dear tax payer - we will repurpose these ‘utilities’, make your city look like crap, probably cause accidents because we won’t be too careful about where we leave stuff …. oh and we are not responsible … you see we simply ‘facilitate bike sharing’.

The headline,

Josh Kushner’s healthcare start up

caught my eye, so I read on.

Oscar, the health insurance startup co-founded by Joshua Kushner and Mario Schlosser, has raised $165 million in new venture capital funding. A source puts the post-money valuation at $3.2 billion, which is up from $2.7 billion in early 2016.

Oh … not healthcare start up at all … health Insurance startup. I do find the conflation of these two very different businesses in the US not just confusing - but almost deliberately misleading.

…. and yes, Josh is the Kushner that you don’t read too much about.

Read All About It

This is a great read … essentially talking about the many different initiatives around the globe working on creating meat to eat, independent of animal.

Then there is this where The US Cattlemen’s Association are essentially proposing that

FSIS exclude from the statutory definitions of “meat” and “beef” those products that are not “derived from animals born, raised, and harvested in the traditional manner.”

Personally, I am with the Cattlemen - we should be clear about where our food comes from … count me in on the side of ‘clear GMO labelling’ for example. But then I am also on the side of those Cattlemen being clear about where their animals come from … how they are treated … etc etc but they do tend to fight that - because really they are also against this kind of publicity:

But that all said - I am also interested in defining terms. Is meat something that is defined by process …. i.e. all meat comes from an animal or content / structure …. i.e. all meat is meat if it cannot be distinguished by scientific analysis.

I also full expect ‘brand' to enter the debate … after-all - I can make ‘Champagne’ anywhere in the world - and you will not be able to chemically or structurally separate it from Champagne made in Champagne - but of course we all know that only Champagne made in Champagne can actually be called Champagne. In other words - there is a prior case in the food world that process does NOT define what you can call something - only the source defines it. ON that basis - the Cattlemen might win.

Sunny, restful, quiet - the opposite of the actual day!

Turner Sports Service to Let Fans Buy Portions of NBA Games - Bloomberg

.. which got me to wondering how fans might game the system ~~ eg I will only watch the last quarter to save money … but what if the price to watch was actually a kind of surge pricing model combined with INCREASING the price per minute as the game progressed and actually increased faster the closer the game and the more people there are tuning in.

So, for example to watch the last quarter might only be a 10% saving over the price to watch the entire game … and if it was real close with many fans tuning in as the game reaches its climax it might actually cost you more … would that work … kind of brings gaming into the very act of watching?

I concluded this post with the comment that ‘there is nothing new’ - but of course there is … a new twist.

Rowntree and others like him were of course trying to build environments for people in their employ that only had slums to live in as an alternative. The tech giants seem to be more focused on ensuring that their staff don’t ‘wander off' … think of it as an extension to the ‘free lunch’ that morphed into ‘on campus gourmet restaurants’ .. the problem is that staff then get to go home at night. This fixes that issue.

Of course people working, living and sleeping in one environment mirrors that old world of servitude, that on the face of it works, but actually covers a raft of moral and legal issues, not to mention how it makes it very difficult to move on … want to leave the company? Then find a new place to live at the same time.

Just 5 hours and 5 miles separates these two images.

The Facebook scandal is interesting in a number of ways, not the least of which is that we’re sharing our communal outrage on the very platforms that we accuse of breaching our our trust.

The expression of our anger at being turned into a set of psychographic profiles is, ultimately, adding to our psychographic profiles.

Dave Pell - Next Draft

The GDPR provides the following rights for individuals:

• The right to be informed
• The right of access
• The right to rectification
• The right to erasure
• The right to restrict processing
• The right to data portability
• The right to object
• Rights in relation to automated decision making and profiling.

(ORDER LIST: 583 U.S.) MONDAY, MARCH 19, 2018 ORDER IN PENDING CASE 17A909 TURZAI, MICHAEL C., ET AL. V. LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS, ET AL. The application for stay presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is denied.

The original is just as short

Cheesecake - is it a pie?

Hot Dog - is it a sandwich?

… and what exactly defines a bridge?

And all if that was just yesterday. Today there is a new one that has hit the national news.

Is meat defined by it coming from animals OR by what it is made of?

Those seem to be the two opposing arguments that are emerging today - and possibly coming to a Supreme Court near you soon.

Building on a recent debate as to whether a ‘hot dog’ is actually a ‘sandwich’, which at one point had me listening to a podcast asking that if a ‘cheese cake’ is not a ‘cake’ - is it a ‘pie’ ?

I believe that this too fits into a similar debate category.

This image of a bridge (?) was shared by my good friend and And Another Thing co-conspirator, good egg and ‘chap’ Dr. Watson (I kid you not) … asking if I was still interested in bridges.

I am. But my question is whether this is one?

What defines a bridge for you?

The Atlas Obscura Source

In a parallel space, on a different topic, someone directed me to 16 of Stephen Hawking’s Most Mind-Expanding Quotes.

Number 10 resonated for the micro.blog community, ending thus;

With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.